American Literature from 1830 to the Turn of the Century | Department of English and Comparative Literature Department of English and Comparative Literature American Literature from 1830 to the Turn of the Century RATIONALE My objective is to focus on mid-19th century American literature. In the most general terms, I am particularly interested in representations of freedom and captivity during this time period. The following titles are arranged chronologically.

— "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1831) — "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1831) — "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" (1835) — "The Minister's Black Veil" (1835) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1880-1882) "Nature" (1836) — "The American Scholar" (1837) — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) Nathaniel Hawthorne — Selections from Final Harvest (assorted years) Harriet Jacobs (c.1813-1897) — Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: (1861) — Written by Herself — Portrait of a Lady (1881) — "The Art of Fiction" (1884) Mark Twain (1835-1910) — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Herman Melville — "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) Kate Chopin (1851-1904) —

 The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Henry James — "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) Edith Wharton (1862-1937) — The House of Mirth (1905) Latest News Prof.

James Shapiro's Book, The Year of Lear, Shortlisted for PBK Award The Phi Beta Kappa Society is pleased to announce the titles of the fifteen books from among those released in 2015 that are on the short lists for the Society’s annual book awards, The Christian Gauss Award, The Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James - Author Biography • Where—New York, New York, USA • Death—February 28, 1916 • Education—Attended schools in France and Switzerland Harvard Law School • Awards—British Order of Merit from King George V Henry James was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. James alternated between America and Europe for the first 20 years of his life, after which he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. He is primarily known for the series of novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans.

James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later novels and tales. Life James was born in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr., was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-19th-century America. In his youth James traveled back and forth between Europe and America. At the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law. James published his first short story, A Tragedy of Error, at age 21, and devoted himself to literature. In 1866–69 and 1871–72 he was a contributor to The Nation and Atlantic Monthly. Among James's masterpieces are Daisy Miller (1879) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The Bostonians (1886) is set in the era of the rising feminist movement.

What Maisie Knew (1897) depicts a preadolescent girl who must choose between her parents and a motherly old governess. In The Wings of the Dove (1902) an inheritance destroys the love of a young couple. James considered The Ambassadors (1903) his most "perfect" work of art. James's most famous novella is The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story in which the question of childhood corruption obsesses a governess. Although James is best known for his novels, his essays are now attracting a more general audience. James regularly rejected suggestions that he marry, and after settling in London proclaimed himself "a bachelor." F. W. Dupee, in several well-regarded volumes on the James family, originated the theory that he had been in love with his cousin Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections. James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention.

James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter from May 6, 1904, to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry". How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers, but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasi-erotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment." To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile I can only try to live without you." He corresponded in almost equally extravagant language with his many female friends, writing, for example, to fellow-novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say?

when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others." Work James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature. His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World (Europe), embodying a feudal civilization that is beautiful, often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive and embody the virtues—freedom and a more highly evolved moral character—of the new American society. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly. Critics have jokingly described three phases in the development of James's prose: "James the First, James the Second, and The Old Pretender" and observers do often group his works of fiction into three periods. In his apprentice years, culminating with the masterwork The Portrait of a Lady, his style was simple and direct (by the standards of Victorian magazine writing) and he experimented widely with forms and methods, generally narrating from a conventionally omniscient point of view.

Plots generally concern romance, except for the three big novels of social commentary that conclude this period. In the second period, as noted above, he abandoned the serialised novel and from 1890 to about 1897[citation needed], he wrote short stories and plays. Finally, in his third and last period he returned to the long, serialised novel. More important for his work overall may have been his position as an expatriate, and in other ways an outsider, living in Europe. While he came from middle-class and provincial belongings (seen from the perspective of European polite society) he worked very hard to gain access to all levels of society, and the settings of his fiction range from working class to aristocratic, and often describe the efforts of middle-class Americans to make their way in European capitals. He confessed he got some of his best story ideas from gossip at the dinner table or at country house weekends. He worked for a living, however, and lacked the experiences of select schools, university, and army service, the common bonds of masculine society.

He was furthermore a man whose tastes and interests were, according to the prevailing standards of Victorian era Anglo-American culture, rather feminine, and who was shadowed by the cloud of prejudice that then and later accompanied suspicions of his homosexuality. Major Novels Although any selection of James's novels as "major" must inevitably depend to some extent on personal preference, the following books have achieved prominence among his works in the views of many critics. James believed a novel must be organic. Parts of the novel need to go together and the relationship must fit the form. If a reader enjoys a work of art or piece of writing, then they must be able to explain why. The very fact that every reader has different tastes, lends to the belief that artists should have artistic freedom to write in any way they choose to talk about subject matter that could possibly interest everyone. The first period of James's fiction, usually considered to have culminated in The Portrait of a Lady, concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America. The style of these novels is generally straightforward and, though personally characteristic, well within the norms of 19th century fiction.

Although the book shows some signs of immaturity—this was James's first serious attempt at a full-length novel—it has attracted favourable comment due to the vivid realisation of the three major characters. Although Roderick Hudson featured mostly American characters in a European setting, James made the Europe–America contrast even more explicit in his next novel. In fact, the contrast could be considered the leading theme of The American (1877). This book is a combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Washington Square (1880) is a deceptively simple tragicomedy that recounts the conflict between a dull but sweet daughter and her brilliant, domineering father. The book is often compared to Jane Austen's work for the clarity and grace of its prose and its intense focus on family relationships. James was not particularly enthusiastic about Jane Austen, so he might not have regarded the comparison as flattering. In fact, James was not enthusiastic about Washington Square itself. He tried to read it over for inclusion in the New York Edition of his fiction but found that he could not. So he excluded the novel from the edition.

In The Portrait of a Lady (1881) James concluded the first phase of his career with a novel that remains his most popular piece of long fiction. The narrative is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of his early phase, The Portrait of a Lady is described as a psychological novel, exploring the minds of his characters, and almost a work of social science, exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans, the old and the new worlds. The Bostonians (1886) is a bittersweet tragicomedy that centres on Basil Ransom, an unbending political conservative from Mississippi. The storyline concerns the contest between Ransom and Olive for Verena's allegiance and affection, though the novel also includes a wide panorama of political activists, newspaper people, and quirky eccentrics. James followed with The Princess Casamassima (1886), the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in far left politics and a terrorist assassination plot. The book is something of a lone sport in the Jamesian canon for dealing with such a violent political subject. But it is often paired with The Bostonians, which is also concerned with political issues.

Just as James was beginning his ultimately disastrous attempt to conquer the stage, he wrote The Tragic Muse (1890). This novel offers a wide, cheerful panorama of English life and follows the fortunes of two would-be artist. The book reflects James's consuming interest in the theatre and is often considered to mark the close of the second or middle phase of his career. Criticism, Biographies and Fictional Treatments James's work has remained steadily popular with the limited audience of educated readers to whom he spoke during his lifetime, and remained firmly in the British canon, but after his death American critics, such as Van Wyck Brooks, expressed hostility towards James's long expatriation and eventual naturalisation as a British citizen. Oscar Wilde once criticised him for writing "fiction as if it were a painful duty". Despite these criticisms, James is now valued for his psychological and moral realism, his masterful creation of character, his low-key but playful humour, and his assured command of the language. Early biographies of James echoed the unflattering picture of him drawn in early criticism. F.W.

Dupee, as noted above, characterised James as neurotically withdrawn and fearful, and although Dupee lacked access to primary materials his view has remained persuasive in academic circles, partly because Leon Edel's massive five-volume work, published from 1953 to 1972, seemed to buttress it with extensive documentation. The published criticism of James's work has reached enormous proportions. The volume of criticism of The Turn of the Screw alone has become extremely large for such a brief work. The Henry James Review, published three times a year, offers criticism of James's entire range of writings, and many other articles and book-length studies appear regularly. Legacy Perhaps the most prominent examples of James's legacy in recent years have been the film versions of several of his novels and stories. Three of James's novels were filmed: The Europeans (1978), The Bostonians (1984) and The Golden Bowl (2000). The Iain Softley-directed version of The Wings of the Dove (1997) was successful with both critics and audiences.

Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square (1997) was well received by critics, and Jane Campion tried her hand with The Portrait of a Lady (1996) but with much less success. Most of James's work has remained continuously in print since its first publication, and he continues to be a major figure in realist fiction, influencing generations of novelists. James has allowed the genre of the novel to become worthy of a literary critic's attention. James has formulated a theory of fiction that many today still discuss and debate. In 1954, when the shades of depression were thickening fast, Ernest Hemingway wrote an emotional letter in which he tried to steady himself as he thought James would: "Pretty soon I will have to throw this away so I better try to be calm like Henry James. Did you ever read Henry James? He was a great writer who came to Venice and looked out the window and smoked his cigar and thought." The odd, perhaps subconscious or accidental allusion to "The Aspern Papers" is striking.

More recently, James' writing was even used to promote Rolls-Royce automobiles: the tagline "Live all you can, it's a mistake not to", originally spoken by The Ambassadors' Lambert Strether, was used in one advertisement. This is somewhat ironic, considering the novel's sardonic treatment of the "great new force" of mass marketing. (Adapted from Wikipedia.) SparkNotes: The Turn of the Screw: Context The Turn of the Screw Henry James Table of Contents Plot Overview Henry James (1843–1916), whose mastery of the psychological novel markedly influenced twentieth-century literature, was born in New York City. His father, Henry James, Sr., was an unconventional thinker who had inherited considerable wealth. James, Sr., became a follower of Swedenborgian mysticism, a belief system devoted to the study of philosophy, theology, and spiritualism, and socialized with such eminent writers as Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, and William Makepeace Thackeray. James’s older brother, William James, profoundly influenced the emerging science of psychology through his Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

He also distinguished himself as an exponent of a brand of philosophical pragmatism he named “radical empiricism,” the idea that beliefs do not work because they are true but are true because they work. The James children were educated in a variety of schools and with private tutors, in what James later called “small vague spasms” of schooling augmented by his father’s extensive library. In 1855 the James family began a three-year tour of Geneva, London, and Paris, an experience that probably influenced James’s later preference for Europe over his native land. After a year at Harvard Law School, he began writing short stories and book reviews. He continued to travel widely from a base in England, where he chose to settle. He became a British subject in 1915, a year before his death at the age of seventy-three.

By the time James died, he had written more than a hundred short stories and novellas, as well as literary and dramatic criticism, plays, travel essays, book reviews, and twenty novels, including The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although James had many friends and acquaintances, he maintained a certain reserve toward most people. An “obscure hurt,” as James later described a mysterious early injury he suffered in connection with a stable fire, haunted him throughout his life. He never married, and the absence of any known romantic attachments has led some critics to speculate that he was a repressed or closeted homosexual. Others attribute the reason for James’s lifelong celibacy to the early death of his beloved cousin Mary “Minny” Temple, the model for several of his heroines. James wrote The Turn of the Screw in 1897, at a low point in his life. In 1895 he had suffered a tremendous personal and professional blow when his play Guy Domville was booed off the London stage.

Deeply wounded, James retreated from London and took refuge in Sussex, eventually taking a long-term lease on a rambling mansion called Lamb House. Shortly thereafter, he began writing The Turn of the Screw, one of several works from this period that revolve around large, rambling houses. Like many writers and intellectuals of the time, James was fascinated by “spiritual phenomena,” a field that was taken very seriously and was the subject of much “scientific” inquiry. The field remained popular even after the unmasking of the Fox sisters, whose claims of being able to communicate with the spirit world had started the craze for spiritualism in the 1840s. Henry James, Sr., and William James were both members of the Society for Psychical Research, and William served as its president from 1894 to 1896. James had written ghost stories before The Turn of the Screw. It was a popular form, especially in England, where, as the prologue to The Turn of the Screw suggests, gathering for the purpose of telling ghost stories was something of a Christmastide tradition.

According to James’s notebooks and his preface to the 1908 edition of The Turn of the Screw, the germ of the story had been a half-remembered anecdote told to him by Edward White Benson, the archbishop of Canterbury: a story of small children haunted by the ghosts of a pair of servants who wish them ill. In Benson’s story, the evil spirits repeatedly tried to lure the children to their deaths. The spin James put on the story was to make everything—the presence of the ghosts, their moral depravity, their designs on the children—purely a function of hearsay. As careful readers have noted, the ghosts are visible only to one person in the tale—the governess who serves as both narrator and protagonist. The Turn of the Screw first appeared in Collier’s Weekly in twelve installments between January and April 1898. Not until after World War I did anyone question the reliability of the governess as a narrator. With the publication of a 1934 essay by the influential critic Edmund Wilson, a revised view of the story began to gain currency.

Wilson’s Freudian interpretation, that the governess is a sexually repressed hysteric and the ghosts mere figments of her overly excitable imagination, echoed what other critics like Henry Beers, Harold Goddard, and Edna Kenton had previously suggested in the 1920s. Throughout the course of his life, Wilson continued to revise and rethink his interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, but all criticism since has had to confront the central ambiguity in the narrative. Is the governess a hopeless neurotic who hallucinates the figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, or is she a plucky young woman battling to save her charges from damnation? Adherents of both views abound, though the former take on the story is rarer. Other critics maintain that the beauty and terror of the tale reside in its utter ambiguity, arguing that both interpretations are possible and indeed necessary to make The Turn of the Screw the tour de force that it is. More Help opera: Twentieth-Century Opera opera Twentieth-Century Opera In the early part of the 20th cent. the foremost operatic composer was Richard Strauss .

Although influenced by Wagner, he composed operas with even richer and more stunning orchestrations, often using dissonant harmonies and abandoning tonality to emphasize the humor or drama of a scene. Among his most successful operas are Salomé (1905), Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), and the allegorical Die Frau ohne Schatten ( The Woman Without a Shadow, 1919). After World War I a period of innovation began that has continued to the present day. Alban Berg 's Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937; posthumously completed in 1979) have been the most enduring of early atonal operas. Arnold Schoenberg 's serial work (see serial music ) Moses and Aaron (unfinished, 1932) had successful revivals in the United States in the 1960s and again in the United States and Germany in the 1980s.

George Gershwin 's Porgy and Bess (1935) is considered the first great American opera, while Paul Hindemith 's Mathis der Maler (1938), dealing with the life of the painter Mathias Grünewald, represents the trend of the 1930s toward lavishly staged, moralistic epics. Operatic composers who have emerged since World War II include Gian-Carlo Menotti , Samuel Barber , Alberto Ginastera , and Hans Werner Henze . The former two have composed in traditional musical idiom, such as Menotti's The Medium (1946), The Consul (1950), and Amahl and the Night Visitors (written for television, 1951) and Barber's Vanessa (1957) and Antony and Cleopatra (1966). Henze's The Young Lord (1965) and Ginastera's Bomarzo (1964) and Beatrix Cenci (1971) are highly innovative and controversial.

Operas by the Americans Douglas Moore and Carlisle Floyd used American history, legend, and folk music, as reflected in Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) and Floyd's Susannah (1955). The most internationally accepted post–World War II composer of operas was the Englishman Benjamin Britten . His first operatic success was Peter Grimes (1945), followed by The Rape of Lucretia (1946). Britten's other works include Billy Budd (after Melville's story, 1951), The Turn of the Screw (after Henry James's story, 1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (after the novella by Thomas Mann, 1973). Britten's operas are cast in traditional musical and dramatic form.

Some late 20th-century avant-garde operas include The Devils of Loudon (1968–69) by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki ; Le Grand Macabre (1978) by the Hungarian György Ligeti ; and Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), Akhnaton (1984), The Voyage (1992), and White Raven (1998), all by the American composer Philip Glass . Other operatic works by Americans in the same period include Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) by John Adams ; The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) by John Corigliano ; and McTeague (1992) and A View from the Bridge (1999) by William Bolcom . Owing to widespread indifference to new works on the part of the opera-going public and most major opera houses, plus the financial burden incurred in staging a new work, many composers in the latter part of the 20th cent.

turned to community and college opera workshops to produce their works. However, in the 1990s and 2000s this trend was partly reversed, with younger audiences becoming interested in opera, and more large companies presenting operas by contemporary composers. Sections in this article: Henry James - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. Henry James Biography of Henry James Henry James (1843-1916), noted American-born English essayist, critic, and author of the realism movement wrote The Ambassadors (1903), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881); "I always understood," he continued, "though it was so strange--so pitiful. You wanted to look at life for yourself--but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!"--Ch. 54 James's works, many of which were first serialised in the magazine The Atlantic Monthly include narrative romances with highly developed characters set amongst illuminating social commentary on politics, class, and status, as well as explorations of the themes of personal freedom, feminism, and morality.

In his short stories and novels he employs techniques of interior monologue and point of view to expand the readers' enjoyment of character perception and insight. Often comparing the Old World with the New, and influenced by Honore de Balzac , Henrik Ibsen , Charles Dickens , and Nathaniel Hawthorne of whose work he wrote "too original and exquisite to pass away" James would become widely respected in North America and Europe, earning honorary degrees from Harvard and Oxford Universities, in 1911 and 1912 respectively. He was acquainted with many notable literary figures of the day including Robert Browning , Ivan S. Turgenev , Emile Zola , Lord Alfred Tennyson , and Gustave Flaubert . American-born and never married, James would live the majority of his life in Europe, becoming a British citizen in 1915 after the outbreak of World War I. Many of his works have inspired other author's works and adaptations to the stage and screen. Henry James was born on 15 April 1843 in New York City, New York State, United States, the second of five children born to theologian Henry James Sr.

(1811-1882) and Mary Robertson nee Walsh. Henry James Sr. was one of the most wealthy intellectuals of the time, connected with noted philosophers and transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau , as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne , Thomas Carlyle , and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; fellow friends and influential thinkers of the time who would have a profound effect on his son's life. Education was of the utmost importance to Henry Sr. and the family spent many years in Europe and the major cities of England, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Germany, his children being tutored in languages and literature. After several attempts at attending schools to study science and law, by 1864 James decided he would become a writer. He was always a voracious reader and he now immersed himself in French, Russian, English, and American classic literature. He ventured out on his own travels to Europe, wrote book reviews, and submitted stories to magazines such as the North American Review, Nation, North American Tribune, Macmillan's, and The Atlantic Monthly which also serialised his first novel Watch and Ward (1871).

James left America and lived for a time in Paris, France before moving to London, England in 1876. He continued his prodigious output of short stories and novels including Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Confidence (1879), Washington Square (1880), The Pension Beaurepas (1881), and his extended critical critical essay Hawthorne (1879). He also wrote the novella Daisy Miller (1879) which he later based a play on; one of many that proved unsuccessful. A Little Tour In France (1884) was followed by The Bostonians (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Reverberator (1888), The Tragic Muse (1890), The Pupil (1891), Sir Dominick Ferrand (1892), The Death of the Lion (1894), The Coxon Fund (1894), and The Altar of the Dead (1895).

In 1897 James retired from the hectic city of London to the quieter town of Rye in East Sussex, where James bought "Lamb House" and continued to write What Maisie Knew (1897), In The Cage (1898), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Beast in the Jungle (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904), Italian Hours (1909), and The Outcry (1911). Autobiographies include A Small Boy And Others (1913), Notes Of A Son And Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917). In 1904 James travelled to America where he embarked on a cross-country lecture tour, which inspired his series of essays first published in North American Review, Harper's, The Fortnightly Review then in 1907 as The American Scene. When World War I broke out, being an American ex-patriate, James was not happy with America's reluctance to join the war and became a British Citizen in 1915.

In 1916 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George V. After several years of decline and a stroke a few months earlier, Henry James died of pneumonia on 28 February 1916. His ashes were interred at the Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts, United States, his stone inscribed "Novelist, Citizen of Two Countries, Interpreter of His Generation On Both Sides Of The Sea". A memorial stone was placed for him in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, England in 1976. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?--from the Preface of The Ambassadors Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2008. All Rights Reserved. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission. Forum Discussions on Henry James Recent Forum Posts on Henry James I've since seen there's a different place for discussion of this novel and I've copied my post there....

Posted By Jackson Richardson in James, Henry || 0 Replies The Princess Casamassima The novel tells of a clever young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, whose young mother had long ago murdered his father, Lord Frederick. Young Hyacinth begins to dabble in revolutionary politics and finally commits himself to an assassination attempt in London. Ultimately he kills himself instead, fearing among other things that his lethal mission will recall the shameful felony and incarceration of his long dead mother. But the novel is titled The Princess Casamassima! The role of the princess in the ending is fascinating. Both her and Hyacinth are manipulated like puppets by the urbane and supremely intelligent Paul Muniment. Hyacinth has been charged to assassinate her e... Posted By Gladys in James, Henry || 0 Replies Henry James major phase: what do you think? So I'm writing on James' relationship to tradition, focusing on The Ambassadors and Wings of the Dove. Basically, I'd be very interested to find out where you think James' late novels are in relation to modernism, impressionism, realism etc. Any feedback on these two novels or Henry James in general would be appreciated!

My argument is that the late novels are not increasingly anti-mimetic but rather undermine the dichotomy of impressions/actuality. I'm using Lacan's work on the Real as a framework, so it would be fantastic if you have any thoughts on that too. :) Thanks in advance!!... Posted By tasnim in James, Henry || 4 Replies Why I love reading Henry James: an analysis In these days of fast paced entertainment reading a book can be the equivalent of a walk in a spring forest. The story is handed out at a measured tempo and you can digest it at your leisure. Having read a particularly difficult part you can stare outside for a moment and mull over the words you just read. The story will be waiting there for you to commence reading whenever you are ready. This way of enjoying a book does also allow for appreciating the language used by the author. This is especially important when reading Henry James, I feel. His writing is often intricate and ingenious. It takes time to read a Henry James novel as story, that which makes you turn pages, is of lesser impo...

Posted By tdaonp in James, Henry || 5 Replies "The Other House" - a thriller Have others read Henry James' 1896 suspense thriller, "The Other House"? With blatant and imponderable ambiguity on every page, the novel is so different from his understated earlier novel, "Washington Square" (1880). I intend to read "The Awkward Age" (1899) next. While I found "The Other House" enticing reading, I had immense difficulty in seeing malignity in Rose Armiger until she was exposed as the murderer. On re-reading the first chapter, I see her family background was noxious, she hates children, harmless Mrs Beever dislikes her, and Rose speaks with cryptic irony. Still, murdering Effie on the day she returns from a four year absence seems a bit much. Did she kill to win... Posted By Gladys in James, Henry || 1 Reply The New York Edition Hi all, This is a more materialistic (not literary of cerebral) post. Does anyone now a good website to find rare and collectible books besides Amazon?

I was at a library sale two days ago and came across the original Charles Scribners Sons New York Edition of Novels & Tales of Henry James for $12. However, the collection is missing volumes IV & XVIII. So, as you can probably imagine, I am on a quest for the two missing volumes. The set that I have is an old college library set and is in rough condition. I am collecting for myself and not as a financial investment; however, I would like to get originals and not reprints. I've checked Amazon and right now they don't have the vo... Posted By epi_lon in James, Henry || 0 Replies Help - Henry James christening present My son, Henry James, is to be christened (baptised) and his great-grandmother wants to get him something to remember her by. I thought she could give a H.J book (namesake) and inscribe a few words to him in the front cover. Which title would you recommend? Many thanks : yawnb::thumbs_up... Posted By Hazel from UK in James, Henry || 2 Replies please !!! help me In this year we study The Portrait Of A Lady for Henry James...

I have a question and I want you to answer me please this question is " The international situation plays an important in nearly all James's novels.....Discuss " we're asked to discuss the above sentence.... please give me your opinions about the international situation in The Portrait Of A Lady as fast as you can ... I am very thankful for you ,who answer me... Posted By Saudi in James, Henry || 0 Replies James and the voice of American innocence Bitterfly had earlier asked me some nicely framed questions about James and American innocence, and I think the issue is worth continued discussion under James as a specific author. Here is how we started the discussion, and as an avid Jamesian, there are many aspects to it: Originally Posted by Bitterfly Speaking about James, I was interested in what you said about the American voice being characterised by its innocence, Jozanny. If you read my post, would you care to explain? Do you mean there are many innocent narrators, or that there's a general wistfulness for a lost age of innocence? I would have said that innocence, its loss and its quest were themes rather than ...

Posted By Jozanny in James, Henry || 7 Replies Edels Complete Tales - why are volumes 9-12 so hard to find? I have volumes 1-8 of the Edels Complete Tales and despite years of searching, I've found hardly any of available second hand copies of volumes 9-12 whereas volumes 1-8 are plentiful. Just look on abebooks - many of 1-8 but no volumes 9-12. It's been that way for years. I was wondering why this was - any ideas? I know it's possible to buy compete 1-12 sets but I already have 1-8 and I am now intrigued as to why there is such a disparity in availability?... Posted By philkime in James, Henry || 0 Replies Was James better understood by his intended audience? Reading the Ambassadors now, this is just something I began to contemplate over. Do you suppose that James' intended audieence, that is the people who were reading his work at the time he was writing it would have acutally understood his work better than future readers who are reading his work today?

Or do you think his work would have been equally difficult and confussing to understand for those reading at the time, as it is for many people reading it now?... Posted By Dark Muse in James, Henry || 10 Replies The Jolly Corner What is this story about? I have recently finnished reading The Jolly Corner, and I found it completely confusing, and only have some very vauge notion as to the meaning and purpose of this story. But I also found it dreadfully difficult to get through the thing. If anyone could offer any insight on the story it would be apperciated.... Posted By Dark Muse in James, Henry || 2 Replies Henry James Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver James, Henry Biography of Henry James Henry James (1843-1916) was born on April 15, 1843 to Henry James, Sr., and his wife, Mary Walsh Robertson. His older brother William was born in 1842, and younger siblings Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice were born in 1845, 1846, and 1848, respectively.

Henry Sr., the son of an Irish immigrant, was one of thirteen children, born in Albany, New York. By the time his own children were born, he had inherited a great deal of wealth from his father, and the James family. At the time of Henry Jr.'s birth, the family lived in New York City, where Henry Sr. devoted his time to the study of theology, philosophy, and mysticism, rejecting his father's Presbyterian Church to follow the teachings of Swedish Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. The James children were educated in a variety of unorthodox circumstances - sometimes at schools, sometimes with private tutors, always with access to books and new experiences. Margaret Fuller, Washington Irving, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Ripley visited the James home during Henry Jr.'s boyhood. In 1855, the James family embarked on a three-year-long trip to Geneva, London, and Paris, an experience that influenced Henry Jr.'s decision, as an adult, to live and write in Europe rather than his native America. Upon their return from Europe, Henry Sr.

moved the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, allowing for continued contact with prominent writers and thinkers, including nearby Concord's Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Henry Jr. was a voracious reader and spent his teenage years divided between Cambridge, Europe, and Newport, Rhode Island, where he studied for a time with painter William Morris Hunt. His brother William was found to be a more adept artist, and Henry soon discontinued his lessons, turning instead to writing. In 1861, Henry suffered a back injury. The injury would cause lingering pain throughout his life, and it prevented him from enlisting and serving in the American Civil War. William did not serve either, although their two younger brothers did. Henry briefly enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1862, but quickly decided that studying law was not for him, and returned to literary pursuits. He began publishing reviews and short fiction in various journals in the early 1860s; he also produced travel writing, since between 1869 and 1870, he traveled independently in Europe.

He published his first novel in 1870, and followed this with a series of early works, many of which focused on the experiences of Americans in Europe. After a few unsuccessful attempts at settling in Europe, he moved to Paris in 1875, quickly followed by a move to London. With the exception of a few brief trips, he would remain in Europe for the rest of his life. Henry cultivated acquaintances with many of the major artistic and literary figures in both France and England in his lifetime. He remained a prolific novelist, and also displayed a strong interest in literary criticism. Henry was attracted to the idea of writing for the theater. After producing many unadapted scripts and one modest success in the 1890s, Henry wrote a long drama called "Guy Domville" which opened to negative reactions in London in 1895. Although public opinion subsequently shifted and the play ended up being moderately successful, Henry was deeply traumatized by the initial negative reaction. He did however recover enough to write other theatrical pieces, some of which he later rewrote as novels. Henry remained active late into his life, both producing new works of fiction and editing the "New York Edition," a twenty-four-volume collection of his works.

He finally became a British subject in 1915, and died in London in 1916. Unlike William, who married and fathered five children, Henry remained a bachelor his entire life. Though lacking in definitive evidence, some critics theorize that he was gay, pointing to what they perceive as homoeroticism in relationships such as that of Pemberton and Morgan Moreen in his story "The Pupil" and Peter Quint and Miles in The Turn of the Screw , or to James's facility with female voices in his writing (an ability that may reflect a capacity for empathy rather than evidence of his sexuality). Others suggest his cousin Mary "Minny" Temple as the object of his affection and posit her death from tuberculosis at age twenty-four in 1870 as the reason for James's celibacy. James had spent time with her in Newport and based several of his heroines on her. Still others suggest that the injury that had prevented his service in the Civil War had rendered him impotent.

Among James's most famous literary works are 1878's The Europeans, 1878 commercial success Daisy Miller , 1880's critically acclaimed Washington Square , 1886's The Bostonians, and 1898's The Turn of the Screw. James met and corresponded with a number of American and European literary figures of his day. Among them, Ivan Turgenov, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, and Stephen Crane influenced his literary style and his beliefs. Study Guides on Works by Henry James Literature at the Turn of the Century Literature at the Turn of the Century (1890 - 1918) Late Victorianism The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the development of a number of movements which amounted to a rejection of the principles of Victorianism. Early Victorian writers, responding to the social changes due to the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society and the decline of traditional religious beliefs, adopted a moral aesthetic and maintained that literature should provide fresh values and an understanding of the newly emerging society. Novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot examined complications of forming a personal identity in a world in which traditional social structures were breaking down.

Social mores were their subject and realism their form of expression. By the 1870s, opposing what by now was perceived as a repressive aesthetic, writers began to reject any obligation to produce moral art, as exemplified in the theoretical works of Walter Pater, such as Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). In fiction, this impulse took various forms, among them a return to prose fantasy as displayed in the works of Robert Lewis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886) and Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865). In his dystopian novel Erewhon, or, Over the Range (1872), Samuel Butler criticized the stringent morals of his time. The late Victorian period also saw a more searching realism, accompanied by the emergence of the so-called 'problem novel' in which the institution of marriage and traditional relations between the sexes were re-examined. In the words of the novelist George Gissing, it was an era of "sexual anarchy"; an era in which the laws governing sexual identity and behavior were no longer valid.

The 'fallen woman' was replaced by the 'new woman.' Once the door closed behind Ibsen's Nora, social structures oppressing women became the theme of plays by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and novels by George Moore and Thomas Hardy. One of the most widely read and respected English novelists, Hardy created an important artistic bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influence of Charles Darwin's recently published Origin of Species (1859) on his thought, and his subsequent loss of orthodox religious faith affected all of his writings. Although his novels were uneven in skill, when he stayed in the rural settings of his youth and focused on relations between the sexes, they took on a tragic power rarely equaled by other English novelists. He is credited with introducing fatalism into Victorian literature -- a pessimistic assessment of humanity's ability to cope with a changing social environment. In two of Hardy's final novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896), his bleak and open treatment of sexuality and marriage caused such an outrage among the puritanical Victorian public that he was deeply disillusioned.

Hardy abandoned fiction, and for the rest of his life wrote only poetry. At about the time Hardy was active as a novelist, the French writer Emile Zola formulated a branch of literary realism called naturalism, which reflected many of Hardy's concerns as a novelist. The terms naturalism and realism are often used almost interchangeably, but there is a significant distinction between them: while naturalists supported the realists' aim of careful observation and mimetic depiction of the outer world, their view of the human condition and specific method of writing was strongly indebted to advances in the natural sciences, specifically the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution. In their biologistic view, the human animal was a creature conditioned by influences beyond his or her control and therefore largely devoid of free will or moral choice; a creature shaped by external factors such as heredity, environment, and the pressure of immediate circumstances. In this respect, the premises of the naturalists have gained a reputation for pessimism.

Their method was indebted to the natural and social sciences as well: according to Zola, the writer was to work as an objective 'experimenter' whose function was to observe and record the chain of cause and effect dispassionately and impersonally, without moral judgments. A further formative influence on naturalism can be found in the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The misery of the working classes in urban slums became one of the naturalists' favorite themes in analyzing the human condition. A rebel Victorian novelist who was strongly influenced by naturalism was George Gissing. In New Grub Street (1891) and The Nether World (1889), Gissing portrays the grinding effects of poverty. The subjects of many of his twenty-two novels were the poor and the shabby genteel, a world earlier described by Dickens but treated more seriously by Gissing. Gissing's arguably most memorable novel, however, The Odd Women (1891), dealt with the new woman, this time as an 'odd' or unmarried woman -- the feminist Rhoda Nunn, whose principles are tested by the attractive ex-radical, Everard Barfoot.

In an interesting twist of literary convention, a woman who does not 'fall' dies in childbirth, and the new woman adopts the child. Gissing's work marks a transition from Victorian realism to a grimmer realistic mode. He was influenced by French and Russian novelists, but English Victorian propriety denied him the freedom of literary naturalists on the continent. He wrote about and lived among the lower classes, but at the same time he was not one of them, and his ideal remained the life of scholarly seclusion evoked in By the Ionian Sea (1901) and his last novel, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Naturalism was prominent in drama as well. 'Free' theaters were established throughout Europe for the presentation of naturalist plays, exploring new techniques of acting and production and making use of the potential of artificial lighting. The unsavory, often shocking, but theatrically effective products of naturalism found an expression in the title chosen by George Bernard Shaw for a collection of his dramas, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Shaw began his career as a novelist, publishing in socialist journals.

He was active in socialist and anarchist political movements, and in 1883 he became a founding member of the Fabian Society, an influential socialist organization. Although his novels found little favor with the critics and the public, Shaw began to reach a wide audience through his magazine articles and reviews. His first play, Widowers' Houses, was produced in 1892 and was followed in rapid succession by The Philanderer (1893), Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1893), and You Never Can Tell (1895), which were all published together in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. To make his published plays more accessible to the reading public, Shaw added novelistic stage directions and lengthy prefatory essays revealing his mastery of English prose. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Shaw wrote his greatest and most successful plays: Man and Superman (1904), Major Barbara (1905), and Pygmalion (1913).

Although Shaw won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925 and went on writing plays almost until his death at the age of 94, none of the later plays enjoyed the same kind of success as these earlier works. His influence on twentieth century drama, however, was profound, revolutionizing the overwhelmingly melodramatic Victorian stage with dramas of ideas. Another form which the reaction against Victorianism took was the literary movement known as 'decadence.' An early influence on the movement was the erotic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne, which shocked the Victorian reading public in the seventies and eighties. The preoccupation with sensation shown by Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti led to the literary decadence of the 1890s, epitomized by Oscar Wilde's play Salomé, which he wrote in French for the actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1893. This was followed by Wilde's most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In its ideology of 'aestheticism,' a belief in the notion of art for art's sake, decadence was also a reaction against naturalism.

In literary history, the term decadence specifically applies to a late nineteenth century movement marked by supposedly amoral sentiments, extensive use of sensual or exotic imagery, and aestheticism. A number of the principles of decadence are reflected in Wilde's famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Aestheticism was cultivated in particular by the circle of writers associated with the Rhymers' Club and the periodical The Yellow Book (1894-97) (which also published the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley), among them Wilde, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. It is this group of writers more than any other which is associated with the turn of the century: the term fin de siècle in art and literature is applied primarily to the movements of decadence and aestheticism. The Twentieth Century No sharp dividing line separates the nineteenth from the twentieth century. One of the most highly respected poets of the twentieth century, for example, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, was a member of the Rhymers' Club during his early twenties.

His fame goes beyond his association with this literary movement, however, and in his later years his early aestheticism was replaced by a commitment to social truth and responsibility and a dedication to the Irish cause. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1922. Yeats was considered the greatest poetical influence of the time by T. S. Eliot, whose "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1909-11) is regarded as the first significant "modernist" poem. Until the outbreak of World War I, prose fiction also continued to dominated by a group of writers who had already achieved distinction during the nineteenth century, among them Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells and Henry James, who became a British citizen shortly before his death. Except for Hardy, who abandoned the novel in disgust after the critical reception of Jude the Obscure, all remained extremely active in fiction. H. G.

Wells's most famous science fiction novels, for example, among them The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the World (1898), all appeared in the last years of the nineteenth century. Although Wells later wrote a number of serious novels in the naturalist tradition, all but forgotten now, his early science fiction continues to be enjoyed by a wide audience. By contrast, the Anglo-American Henry James was a writers' writer, psychologically penetrating and technically innovative. His recurring theme was the innocent American abroad, but he made of this seemingly simple story numerous personality studies of psychological complexity. In the words of Joseph Conrad, he was "the historian of fine consciences," especially those of women--wealthy young Americans seduced by the culture and duplicity of Europe and European men, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In these studies, he develops the restricted point of view consistently, characterizing his figures through effective dramatic scenes. His use of ambiguity through layers of narrative perspective is unmatched, especially in his classic tale of the uncanny, The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Three novels of the last phase of his career alone would probably have assured James' lasting fame: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). His impressionistic examination of consciousness in these late novels laid the groundwork for the narrative technique of 'stream of consciousness,' a term coined by his brother, the philosopher William James. As a result, the experiments of modernism are deeply indebted to the work of James. Joseph Conrad greatly admired Henry James, as did most of the important writers of the generation who followed him. Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly, appeared in 1895, but his most famous works did not appear until the turn of the century. In Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad proved himself a master of intricate structure, sustained irony and the sophisticated manipulation of point of view. Conrad often employed a narrator who filtered all the action for the reader, but in Nostromo, considered by many to be his finest novel, he dispensed with this technique.

He was particularly adept at delineating the suffering consciousness, and besides the clash between native cultures and European civilization, his subjects were the effects of isolation and moral deterioration on the individual. Another primary concern of writers of this period was sexuality and sexual mores. Above all it was D. H. Lawrence who abandoned the traditional concerns of the English novel -- manners and morals and society -- to portray sexual relations as a decisive element in human behavior. As a result of his frank portrayal of his favorite subject, two of his major novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), were temporarily banned. Lawrence's forthright depiction of sexuality, however, was an integral part of his crusade against the constricting and sterile values of modern civilization. His importance, and his continuing fame, depend less on technical accomplishments than on his subject matter. His earlier novels such as The White Peacock (1911) and Sons and Lovers (1913) did not go beyond the bounds of what was deemed acceptable, but with the publication of The Rainbow, Lawrence's name began to be associated with sexual license and literary scandal.

Methuen, the publisher, was prosecuted and all the copies of the novel were confiscated. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence's last major novel and an expression of his belief in the possibility of personal fulfillment through sexual relations, was not published in England in an unexpurgated edition until 1961. The novelist E. M. Forster was also concerned with questions of sexuality in his novels, although in his works the subject receives a much more subtle treatment than in Lawrence's. The only novel he ever wrote which treated the subject of homosexuality frankly, Maurice (pub. 1971), did not appear until after his death. Forster began his literary career in 1903 as a writer for The Independent Review, a liberal periodical with anti-imperialist sympathies. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), explored the emotional and sensual deficiencies of the English upper middle class, a theme he was to repeat in the novels that established his reputation as one of England's leading novelists, A Room with a View (1908) and Howard's End (1910).

The last novel he wrote, A Passage to India (1924), is probably also his most enduring. It is both an examination of the social codes and barriers that thwart communication and frustrate human feeling, as well as sharp diagnosis of the less than perfect relationship between the Indians and their English overlords. He eventually gave up writing novels because, as he suggested, of the obligation to write about marriage. Forster was a member of the Bloomsbury group, the most important member of which was Virginia Woolf. Woolf was instrumental in the development of modernism. Her first two novels The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), were conventional in form, giving little hint of the experiments to come, but in 1919 she also published the essay "Modern Fiction," which anticipated her later experiments and served as a manifesto of literary modernism: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions -- trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.

From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms [....] Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? Woolf later playfully asserted that "in or about December 1910" -- the date of an important exhibit of modern French art -- "human nature changed." This statement emphasizes how the modernist impulse in literature paralleled anti-traditionalist movements in 'modern' art, beginning with cubism and abstract art in the early years of the new century. Modernism was influenced as well by developments in psychology and anthropology, especially the work of Freud and Jung and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890); it stressed the active role of the unconscious mind and the importance of the irrational, and made use of myth as thematic material. The pioneers of literary modernism in prose, notably Woolf and James Joyce, rejected traditional narration, replacing it with impressionistic techniques such as stream of consciousness, in which internal experience rather than outward 'reality' is the focus and conventional chronology and causality all but vanish.

For at least a century, realism had been the dominant literary mode in the Western world. When in the twentieth century theoretical physics began to question the causal model of the universe and made room for the random and the relative in the dominant world view, realism ceased to be a compelling force as a literary doctrine. It was not until the 1920s, however, that the framework of the Victorian novel was disrupted for good with the appearance of Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Jacob's Room, both published in 1922. In these seminal works of literary modernism, the rejection of traditional literary forms and values of Victorian literature begun in the last decade of the previous century is complete, establishing the narrative techniques which will be integral to twentieth century literature.

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories - Broadview Press The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories Publication Date: May 7, 2010 ISBN: 9781551119113 / 1551119110 304 pages; 5½" x 8½" Print $14.95 Availability: Worldwide The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories Publication Date: May 7, 2010 ISBN: 9781551119113 / 1551119110 Authors/Editors In 1898, Henry James wrote a novella that would become one of the most famous and critically discussed ghost stories ever written, The Turn of the Screw. Three other examples of James’s tales of the supernatural, “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Jolly Corner,” are included in this edition. These texts reveal on both the thematic and narrative levels James’s deepest concerns as a writer. The texts in this edition are all drawn from the New York Edition of James’s works.

The introduction traces the extensive critical debate around The Turn of the Screw, and situates the texts in contemporary discussions of the supernatural. Appendices include material on the tales’ reception, James’s writings on the supernatural, and the study of the supernatural in the nineteenth century.

Question: Who wrote The Turn Of The Screw in the 19th century and The Ambassadors in the 20th?
Answer: Henry James